sample: "evolution
is at work here... but just what is evolving remains to be seen..."; "there
are only two ways in which we can account for our necessary appraisal of
experience with concepts of these objects.. either experience
makes these concepts possible, or these concepts make experience possible..."

Think about this for a moment: If the human mind does
not loom large in the coming history of the human race, then what is to become
of us? The future is bound to be psychedelic,
because the future belongs to the mind. We are just beginning to push the buttons
on the mind. Once we take a serious engineering approach to this, we are going
to discover the plasticity, the mutability, the eternal nature of the mind and,
I believe, release it from the monkey. My vision of the final human future is
an effort to exteriorize the soul and internalize the body, so that the exterior
soul will exist as a superconducting lens
of translinguistic matter generated out of the body of each of us at a critical
juncture at our psychedelic bar mitzvah. From that point on, we will be eternal
somewhere in the solid-state matrix
of the translinguistic lens we have become. One's body image will exist
as a holographic
wave transform while one is at play in the fields of the lord and living in Elysium.

Let's put all this hype about change and transformation
in perspective. It's underhyped. A few billion years ago, the Earth was a big,
sterile rock covered with puddles of chemical soup. Gradually, little drops
of oil - random chemical combinations - formed in these puddles, and some happened
to absorb nutrients from the outside, causing them to grow. They eventually
split into smaller drops of roughly the same composition. The "cells" that did
a better job of attracting chemicals and dividing survived and split into future
generations. These cells evolved an information
processing mechanism, a way of recording for posterity their recipes for success.
The mechanism they evolved - the genetic code of DNA
- is still in use today. With DNA came an evolutionary advantage: knowledge,
as genetic recipes, could accumulate from generation to generation. As
cells became more sophisticated, they started to communicate, exchanging chemical
messages. Synergistic communities developed that survived or failed together;
if the community was successful, all the individuals were favored by evolution.
This step took another billion years - bringing life to the stage of multicellular
communities, in which cells are no longer out for themselves: digestive cells
depend on skin and muscle cells, and vice versa. These communities became so
close that they collaborated in writing the whole recipe of the community on
one string of DNA. The most interesting evolution shifted from the cellular
level to the community level. Next, these communities of cells, these
organisms, began to abstract information and build special structures - neural
structures - that did nothing but process
information within the community. After communities of cells built up a data
processing apparatus (the neuron), they developed structures for sensing, recording,
and understanding information - eyes, ears, and brains. With neurons,
learning happened within the time span of a single organism. An organism could
learn not to eat a fruit that repeatedly made it sick. Lessons no longer had
to be absorbed through evolution, through the diminished fitness of millions
of individuals over many millennia. Then these learning individuals started
working out the quirks of communicating with each other. The most sophisticated
version is human language,
whereby complex ideas in one brain generate ideas in another. This lets us function
as a community, and in some sense as a single organism. And so we - humanity
- have repeated the process of connection, communication, and construction of
specialized structures to process our communal information. We're replicating
the levels of chemicals and multicellular organisms, abstracting out our methods
of sensing, recording, and understanding information. Language was only the
first step. Telephony, computers, and CD-ROMs are all specialized mechanisms

we've built to bind us together. Now evolution takes place
in microseconds. The first steps in the story of evolution took
a billion years. The next step - nervous systems and brains - took a few
hundred million years. The next steps, including the development of language,
took less than a million years. And the most recent steps seem to be taking
only a few decades. The process is feeding on itself and becoming autocatalytic.
And now we are beginning to depend on computers to help us evolve new computers
that let us produce things of much greater complexity. Yet we don't quite understand
the process - it's getting ahead of us. We're now using programs to make much
faster computers so the process can run much faster. That's what's so confusing
- technologies are feeding back on themselves; we're taking off. We're at that
point analogous to when single-celled organisms were turning into multicelled
organisms. We are amoebas
and we can't figure out what the hell this thing is that we're creating.
I cannot believe that we are at the end of this story - we are not evolution's
ultimate product. There's something coming after us, and I imagine
it is something wonderful. But we may never be able to comprehend it, any more
than a caterpillar
can comprehend turning into a butterfly.

The underlying meanings of the entire "Jupiter
and Beyond the Infinite"
sequence relies heavily on our ideas of divinity and evolution.
Dave represents the "modern" man, as a highly proficient scientist, an
astronaut and adventurer, he is the ideal man in our day and age. Yet he
is totally unprepared for what he faces in the Monolith.
Thematically it's representative of both our fear of being alone (e.g.
the only race in the galaxy, the only real conscious being in the universe,
etc.) and ironically also of our fear of not being alone (of an incredibly
higher form of intelligence to which we are nothing more than an experiment).
Both of these ideas are portrayed in this sequence.

By linking Dave to the intelligence of the Monolith
(as the Starchild) it becomes possible to imagine the Monolith as created
by humans at a higher level of evolution than we humans are currently at;
in this way, we could conceivablyhave engineered
our own evolution.

Visually the film presents the otherworldly quality
of outer space and links that to the idea of divinity and of agreater,
almost omnipotent intelligence. The planets sitting quietly against their
plains of stars are invaded by both theMonolith
and the human starship in our quest to achieve higher and higher states.
In a way it symbolically representsthe destructive
and creative aspects of this urge to push on always higher, more more more.

Dave is growing older, as if his body has out-lived
its usefulness. This is exactly what is happening, for he has reached the
limits of his Humanity. He is about to take the final step, the last transformation.

The shriveled figure on the bed lifts his arm.
It is as though he is reaching out to touch something. We areshocked
to see that he is repeating the gesture that has happened twice before
in the film -- for suddenly, inthe room at
the foot of his bed, the Monolith has appeared once again...

...finally, as the ebon block stands a silent
guard, the transformation is complete. On the bed there is a glowing,childlike figure. Dave Bowman has ceased to exist, but
he has not died: The Star Child has been born.